For three quarters of a century the All England Lawn Tennis Championships have provided an annual demonstration of a nagging national anxiety: that the British male is not quite the man he used to be.

A growing and unavoidable sense of ourselves as a country of heroic failures and fateful bottlers has, in the years since the last war, eroded former notions of pluck and triumph and resolve. Nowhere has this subconscious fear been dramatised with greater regularity than on the lawns of Wimbledon.

Centre Court is about as close as we come to the tents and jousting arenas of a medieval tournament, where some of those original national myths were formed. Champions arrive from far and wide to test their skill and mettle for a summer fortnight, and only one is left standing.

What Radio 5 Live commentators routinely call the "holy grail" of British sport has, of late, however, become more Monty Python than Morte D'Arthur; our questing Lancelots have been replaced by Sir Robins ("when danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled…").

As the years since the legend of Fred Perry (Wimbledon champion 1934, 1935 and 1936) have rolled on, so British nearly-men finding new ways to lose have come and gone; the might-have-beens and the never-weres, Henman and Lloyd, Taylor and Rusedski, Cox and Bates and Mottram and the rest have been asked to carry the hopes of a nation, and seen those hopes dismantled with varying degrees of brutality. Andy Murray always looked as though he might offer something different. For one thing, unlike most of his wilting predecessors, he clearly could never give much of a stuff for the hopes of a nation; he was, like all champions, playing for himself.

For another, he didn't look like he had walked straight out of his home counties' members' club and into the main draw.

Fred Perry – the son of a Co-operative party MP from Stockport and never knighted because of his perceived uppityness – was enraged by the snobberies he encountered at Wimbledon, moved to America and flew for the US air force in the war.

That lingering sense of a chinless elite running the game (and everything else) in this country proved hard to shift, as our Jeremys and Busters came up against the street-smart realities of a global sport.

For the last three years Murray has threatened to make it past the previously impenetrable mental barrier of the semi-final to challenge for the title. Each time he has lost, the idea that he might, after all, be just like the rest, has grown.

It is not surprising that he looked up to the skies, as if expecting the vaulted heavens to shatter, after his ball clipped the outside of the line to give him victory against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga on Friday evening.

As Shakespeare understood only too well, fates and the habits of history are not casually overturned. It has, you guess, taken not only Murray's own profoundly truculent will, plus that of his flame-haired mother and the adamantine Slavic spirit of Ivan Lendl to get him this far, but also – who knows? – the favourable portents of the transit of Venus and the royal jubilee and the procession of a burning torch through the streets of the realm.

As in all quests worth pursuing (as Murray, an obsessive player of video games as well as tennis, knows only too well), all the effort that has gone in to reaching this ultimate test will pale against the final challenge. Having battled all-comers and his own demons, having slain the ghosts of Jeremys past, our champion now has only the greatest player ever to pick up a racket to contend with; a sainted legend, at pains to recover his former crown. What could possibly go wrong?